Gamification of making: Rugby group exhibition, Rust-en-Vrede Gallery

The game of rugby is often steeped in controversy with issues such as toxic masculinity, cultural discourse, homophobia, racial tension, and political coercion regularly being the topic of debate.

The curators at Rust-en-Vrede Gallery invited 14 artists to respond to the theme by either capturing the essence of rugby culture, to celebrate the power of rugby fandom and its ability to bring people together in meaningful ways, or adding to the various discourses and narratives surrounding the sport – “the good, the bad and the ugly”.

I used the notion of fan art as a point of departure, which eventually led me to exploring AI image-making in an attempt to tap into the collective consciousness that surrounds rugby as a sport. With my own artistic practice strongly informed by post-conceptualism, I’ve always been attracted to art that challenges traditional notions of authorship and originality, and blurs the lines between artefact, medium and process. In the end I produced a body of work that exploits a multi-layered textuality that allows viewers to explore and engage with the themes of masculinity, homosocial interaction, fanatical fervour, devotional idolatry, and homoerotic fan fantasies. By using AI I was able to originate and composite artworks that explore the spaces between data and output, and between code and art, and that are both fantastical and grounded in collective expression.

No denying that the validity of AI as a tool for artmaking will be questioned by many - it comes with its own set of readymade ‘controversies’, which is just one reason I’m so absolutely attracted to it. The new crayon in the pencil case only stays transgressive for so long before artists find ways to subvert, and eventually coopt it. Thankfully art has been killed off by new forms of technology so many times since the early 19th Century that we don’t really need to be too concerned about its survival. Long rest the avant-garde!